15 Must-Have Elements in SEO Audit Checklist

If you want to generate more traffic and revenue, you have to know where to begin. Regrettably, it’s pretty challenging to determine what improvements you need. That’s why you must perform an extensive SEO website audit. Doing an audit of your site will allow you to figure out everything you need to know about your website. Doing an SEO will also allow you to know what you need to improve and what you are doing well?

So, If you’re searching for an SEO checklist that will help you improve your website’s organic traffic and rank on Google well, then you should keep on with the article.

The must-have checklist will let you know that your website, whether it’s new or old, is up to the mark with the latest advanced practices in SEO and that you’re not being held by any errors that you might have missed.

According to one of the best SEO service in Auckland, NZ, KWD, an SEO audit is a method of examining how well your web presence links to best practices – it is the primary step to building an implementation strategy with calculable results. The goal of the audit is to identify foundational problems affecting organic search visibility.

Hence, an SEO audit is essential to uncover your website’s weaknesses and strengths for long-term success.

1. Link Google Analytics and Search Console to Your Website

Google Search Console is a basic tool that gives you valuable insights into your website’s performance as well as an estimated data that you can use to enhance your site’s organic traffic and visibility.

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that permits you to view data and insights about how many users are heading to your website, who they are, and how they’re interacting with it.

It’s necessary to monitor your website’s performance. Google Analytics helps you add a small string of code to all of the web pages you want to monitor.

If your webpage doesn’t contain tracking code, you won’t be able to view any statistics about it, such as page visitors, time users spend on a page and other metrics that specify performance.

When you add this code to all your website pages, Google Analytics also doubles as a full catalog of every webpage on your website. This implies that you can instantly and undoubtedly view how many pages you have, what they are, and more all in on location.

2. Generate a Sitemap

A sitemap aims to assist search engines in comprehending which pages should be crawled on your website and which should not. It is simply a list of URLs that define your main content so that it gets crawled and indexed.

A sitemap informs the crawler which files you think are important in your website and provides helpful information about these files. You can get information like when the web page was last updated, how frequently the page is changed, and any alternate language versions. Once you have generated your site map, you need to make sure that this is added to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters tool.

3. Robots.txt

If a page has a robots.txt file with proper guidance inside, it may prevent Google and other search engines from indexing it.

This suggests that pages with this file and those instructions won’t be visible on Google, but they’ll display in your Google Analytics account if you’re tracking them.

If there’s a disparity between how many pages you view in Google search results and Google Analytics, check your pages for robots.txt files that may be liable for stopping Google’s crawlers.

The purpose of your robots.txt file is to make search engine crawlers understand which pages and files they can or can’t inquire from your website. This also prevents certain sections of your site from being crawled. It’s not meant to be used as a way to de-index a web page and stop it from displaying on Google.

4. Using Relevant Keywords

Keywords are an integral component of SEO. They determine when your website shows up in SERPs. When you carry out your SEO audit, you’ll want to examine the keywords you target.

First of all, you need to throw a glance at the keywords you’re placing on your website. Long-tail keywords are the basis of an effective SEO campaign. These keywords generally consist of three or more words.

If you type “Best Chinese restaurants in Dallas,” you will attract more potential and relevant traffic interested in a Chinese restaurant to your blog. So, when you audit your SEO campaign, consider placing long-tail keywords to your content.

If you have a bulk of short-tail keywords, which only include one or two words, you should revisit your strategy. You can get more potential leads by using long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign. If keywords are attracting traffic to your webpage, consider swapping them out for more productive keywords.

Furthermore, you should also add keywords into your title tags and meta descriptions. This will help your pages earn a higher slot against those keywords.

Once you have carried out careful keyword research and identified your target keywords, you should map them out.

Generally, keyword mapping is a framework for the keywords you have chosen to target that mirrors your site’s structure driven by research. The maps’ ultimate goal is to help you determine where to optimize, what content to produce, and where you can attach new web pages to draw more traffic.

5. Check Your Website Speed

Website speed is one of the most significant ranking factors for Google. A slow-loading website ruins your website image permanently. People are unlikely to stay on a website if it loads slow.

Secondly, If your website takes time to load, you will probably lose your conversion. Google loves websites that load fast because they want visitors to have a wonderful user experience.

So, you should make sure your site opens quickly. You can monitor your page speed through Google PageSpeed Insights.

6. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Another must-have element in your audit list is Mobile-friendliness. It is an essential part of your SEO campaign. Statistics show that 61 percent of customers are more likely to purchase from mobile-friendly sites. So, you must optimize your site for mobile. Mobile-friendly sites also get top position in SERPs.

You can make your site mobile-friendly by applying a responsive design. A responsive design assures that your website adjusts to whatever device a visitor is using. Your website will showcase accurately on desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.

Doing it will allow you to have a better user experience for your audience and browse your site easily.

7. On-page SEO and Content

Without quality content and quality on-page experience, your website will never show up on SERPs. So you always need to make great content for your visitors and not only for search engines. The content you create conveys your message, educates your visitors, and convinces them to buy your products and services over your competition. Providing high-quality content is one of the most remarkable things you can do to draw consumers and build your business interest.

8. Locate and Correct Duplicate Title Tags

Optimized title tags are the fundamental element of SEO; as a matter of fact, they’re usually the first thing any SEO expert would take a look at to help a page rank.

A title tag tells search engines what the page is all about. It would help if you created compelling title tags that should be unique. Because if your tags are not unique, you are not going to be found on SERPs. It would be best not to create lengthy title tags because they will not be visible on search listings completely, and the rest of the parts will be missing.

9. Write Compelling Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions show below your site’s title tag on the SERPs. Meta description encourages a visitor to click on your listing over someone else’s and can either positively or negatively influence your organic CTR.

If you don’t have a meta description in your content or blog, search engines will show part of your page’s content, but this could include navigation text and other elements and be far from enticing.

If you have a unique meta description, there is a good chance that it will encourage more clicks.

10. Keep Updating Your Content

It is very crucial to monitor the quality of your content. You should not only give importance to the high-quality content, but you should also check the need for any pruning, which is cutting all that is not needed. Your content should always be updated, up to the mark, and greatly helpful and useful.

If you find any content on your website that’s not valuable, if it’s not up to date anymore, it will not give anything to the people, so It shouldn’t have to be on your website.

11. Make Sure Your Site is Secure

This is another must-have element for SEO audit that requires you to have a secure website. To build confidence, you should make sure your site is secure and safe for internet users.

People don’t prefer to visit websites where their data is at risk. Similarly, Google doesn’t place sites on top unless they are safe for visitors.

While auditing your website, you should make sure your site is encrypted with HTTPS. This indicates a secure site.

As long as you have that label, your site will be safe for your viewers, and Google will permit your site to rank.

12. Voice Search Optimization

Voice search has become a popular trend to conduct searches. If you aspire to stay ahead of the game, you must audit your site content to make it voice search-friendly.

First of all, you should make your content easily readable. If a person reads your content loud, it should go with the flow.

In a voice search, people usually use long-tail keywords. So, you need to place long-tail keywords in your content to gain traffic of VS.

Suppose, if someone types “How to make pizza?” your content should respond to that question undeviatingly.

When you give your audience appropriate and relevant information, you will be more likely to show up in the featured snippet.

13. Look for Errors

While doing an SEO audit, you must crawl your site to detect errors.

For identifying errors, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog. This helps you identify errors on your website and fix them to enhance your site’s performance.

You can begin by identifying web pages that are not currently indexed and fix errors stopping Google from crawling them.

Moreover, look for broken pages that display an “Error 404” message. This occurs when pages get deleted or the URLs change. Devising redirects for these links will help hinder your visitors from receiving error reports.

By mending errors and denied pages, you’ll help direct users to the relevant information.

14. Replace or Remove Broken links

A broken link is any link to a webpage that is no more present. Broken links (or “dead links”) are typical whenever you completely remove a page from your website without using a redirect.

Broken links are frequent throughout the Internet, and any time you see an error message stating “404,” it implies that a link no longer connects to a page. If you see many broken links on your website, it means you are not offering a better user experience. Also, it’ll lead to a significant drop in your traffic and conversions. You can also lose your ranking in Google SERPs.

Therefore, you should immediately find broken links, remove or replace them.

15. Indexed pages

When search engines crawl over your site, it “sees” your content and indexes your pages. Indexing is important to your page, showing in SERPs. If your pages don’t get indexed, they won’t show up in the search results, and it will damage your SEO efforts.

While auditing, you need to ensure that Google should not accidentally block your pages.

You can see your index status summary in the Google Search Console.

This feature will allow you to view the number of pages that Google has crawled on your domain.

If you observe that the number of pages doesn’t increase, then chances are some of your pages will not get indexed.

When you review your pages, you can explore your site to recover a record of indexed pages.

Furthermore, you can write “robots.txt” at the bottom of your URL to view pages that are denied or not listed.

By doing this will allow you to determine which pages are indexed and which ones are rejected.

It’s an effective way to help index your pages that will promote your SEO efforts.